Patrick Modiano - Life Quotes

4 Sourced Quotes

View all Patrick Modiano Quotes
The doctor used to tell me that every person about to die becomes a music box playing the melody that best describes his life, his character, and his hopes. For some, it's a popular waltz; for others, a march.

Patrick Modiano
We passed the Gardens and turned down Avenue de New York. There, under the embankment trees, I had the unpleasant
sensation that I was dreaming. I had already lived my life and was just a ghost hovering in the tepid air of Saturday evening. Why try to renew ties which had been broken and look for paths that had been blocked off long ago? And the plump, moustachioed little man, walking beside me, hardly seemed real.

Patrick Modiano
With the passing of the years, each neighbourhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life, called to mind in successive layers as if you could decipher the writings superimposed on a palimpsest. And also the lives of the thousands upon thousands of other, unknown, people passing by on the street or in the Métro passageways at rush hour.

Patrick Modiano
Children are liable to expect more from life than their parents, and faced with adversity their reaction is more violent. They go farther, much farther than their parents, and, thereafter, their parents are unable to protect them.

Patrick Modiano